Indeed, many are the sweet and musical strains that he has sung about
the bells, and he often wished that "somebody would bring together all
the best things that have been written upon them, both in prose and
verse."

Southey calls bells "the poetry of the steeples"; and the poets of all
ages have had more or less to say upon this subject. Quaint old George
Herbert told us to

"Think when the bells do chime
'Tis Angel's music!"


It was a curious theory of Frater Johannes Drabicius, that the principal
employment of the blessed in heaven will be the continual ringing of
bells; and he occupied four hundred and twenty-five pages of a work
printed at Mentz, in 1618, to prove the same.

Truly has it been said: "From youth to age the sound of the bell is sent
forth through crowded streets, or floats with sweetest melody above the
quiet fields. It gives a tongue to time, which would otherwise pass over
our heads as silently as the clouds, and lends a warning to its
perpetual flight. It is the voice of rejoicing at festivals, at
christenings, at marriages, and of mourning at the departure of the
soul. From every church-tower it summons the faithful of distant valleys
to the house of God; and when life is ended they sleep within the bell's
deep sound. Its tone, therefore, comes to be fraught with memorial
associations, and we know what a throng of mental images of the past can
be aroused by the music of a peal of bells.